Just want to chime in and say this is one of the best tools, I have this permanently pinned in Arc and it makes it really, really easy to collaborate.
Some more dots:
- free, open source, encrypted and private
- I hated this at first because the shortcuts weren’t intuitive. IMO shortcuts are the #1 most important feature of a whiteboarding tool because you never want the interface to be a process step. This has improved drastically and it’s best in class now!
- very stable and widely used for systems design interviews, basically every startup is on this now and even Meta uses this white-labelled for their interviews
- the easy collaboration and easy jump in (going to their homepage opens up a whiteboard) makes this an ideal pair for new-age tools like Arc
- the scribbly design style humanizes system design and makes it seem lower stakes, IMO makes a big difference in my process
- seems to have a small footprint, I’ve used this on airplane wifi before without latency
kroki.io maintains a collection of text to image tool. niolesk is a great frontend for kroki.
Love plantuml as my goto for diagram-aa-code.Yesterday I learnt about d2lang. It looks better as a language. Nothing beats TiKZ when it comes to look of diagram.
Nice, thanks for sharing. I love Excalidraw but tldraw [0] (which I assume is a play on "tldr"?) seems just as good if not a tiny bit better in some small ways at first glance. There's also an Obsidian plugin, though it is still in beta [1].
Very happy to see more options in this space. Draw.io is still usually my default for "official" drag-and-drop diagrams, but these tools fill a much-needed gap (in the remote-first world) where physical whiteboards used to be, and lower the barrier for quicker diagrams and ad-hoc discussions.
Love the tool, been using it for several years now for live whiteboarding. A self-hosted version integrates really well with org-mode through org-excalidraw witg kroki-cli used for svg rendering
Same. I've also used it for quite a few larger pieces of work in the last few years and was very happy with it.
The handdrawn-looking but still tidy diagrams really give a 100+ page document a more approachable feel when used consistently than other more "sterile" diagrams.
My office is predominantly WFH. I’ve found that Excalidraw spans the divide between collaborative white boarding and traditional diagramming effortlessly.
I can do back-of-the-napkin drawing sessions with my peers in realtime and flip that into c4, UML, and Balsamiq-style wire framing with very little effort, and little friction when pulling in both local team members and outside contributors. You can get a hell of a lot of mileage out of the free/oss offerings, but if you use it consistently with a small team Plus is a slam dunk. My office has fought tooth and nail over collaborative tools like this for years and got little traction, when I threw Excalidraw at ‘em it was like brandy on an infant’s gums: instant pacification and desired effect. I feel a little embarrassed fawning over it but it’s real fucking good.
I'm constantly DM'd at work about how I'm able to create the "cool drawings" in my blog/wiki posts, and I enthusiastically point to excalidraw.com.
I have a background in vector illustration, which is all about creating subpixel-perfect designs. I'm also a bit of a perfectionist, which I think a lot of people here can relate to. I mention this because the reason Excalidraw really works for me is that it frees me from worrying about design. When you literally can't create something that looks "perfect", you're freed up to just sketch your idea without worrying about the visual representation.
Excalidraw is awesome.
Also, if you're into Obsidian (local filesystem markdown superpowers) its Excalidraw integration is fantastic. Drawings in your notes, notes in your drawings, whatever you want, however you want it.
This tool is absolutely fantastic. I’ve used it for years and makes communication and thinking so much easier. I know that really applies to any diagraming tool but excalidraw is particularly simple with a non-existent barrier of entry.
I love Excalidraw but I feel like at some point recently the text inside a box aligns to the grid separately to the box it’s in. The effect being that drawing a box, writing in it then dragging it around breaks the alignment
Huh? Are you sure you aren't accidentally adding a separate text box? I do this sometimes when I double-click the empty space in the center of a box intending to edit the text. I've found it's better to double-click the border of the box to reliably guarantee that I'm actually editing the box itself rather than a new separate text element.
I have to agree this a a great tool. I had low expectations, but I found it easy to use and the AI diagram generator actually worked on my experiments.
Excalidraw itself is also pretty cool as an embeddable widget, we recently built a cool real-time AI-accelerated drawing playground [1] (source [2]) and the experience was super fun!
Some more dots:
- free, open source, encrypted and private
- I hated this at first because the shortcuts weren’t intuitive. IMO shortcuts are the #1 most important feature of a whiteboarding tool because you never want the interface to be a process step. This has improved drastically and it’s best in class now!
- very stable and widely used for systems design interviews, basically every startup is on this now and even Meta uses this white-labelled for their interviews
- the easy collaboration and easy jump in (going to their homepage opens up a whiteboard) makes this an ideal pair for new-age tools like Arc
- the scribbly design style humanizes system design and makes it seem lower stakes, IMO makes a big difference in my process
- seems to have a small footprint, I’ve used this on airplane wifi before without latency